Edward Hopper’s New York

Edward Hopper (1882–1967) was the painter of small-town America. This we know. That his small town happened to be New York City, his home for nearly sixty years, we may not know. “Edward Hopper’s New York,” now on view at the Whitney Museum of American Art, tells the hometown story of an artist we thought we knew all along in a novel and illuminating way. [...] 

Hopper treated New York as his own small town. James Panero, The New Criterion

“Edward Hopper’s New York” opened at the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, on October 19, 2022, and remains on view through March 5, 2023.

e con questa mostra che si prospetta molto interessante auguro a tutti un felice 2023! 

Happy Hanukkah and Merry Christmas!

 Happy Hanukkah and Merry Christmas!

Ghost Writer

Once a rare species, celebrity authored children’s books have become stalwarts of supermarket books aisles. Perfect for a grandparent hunting a last-minute Christmas gift, or a parent looking for something that will appeal to a child reluctant to read, books by stars have become the go-to for many. Those buying them might have it in the back of their minds that these “authors” might not have done much of the writing. But that doesn’t matter, does it? As long as the kids are reading, that’s what counts.

For children’s authors who do write their own stuff, it’s a little galling. They’d give their hind teeth for a spot on that shelf – and surely they are no less deserving of exposure and recognition. As a writer of children’s fiction, I’ve been known to turn a shade of green, too. But I’m conflicted, because in addition to writing original and mostly unrecognised books for young readers, I also work as a ghost writer. Anonymous (ghost writer), The Guardian

Coffeehouses and Proust

Coffeehouses had existed for centuries in the Muslim Ottoman realms before they spread to Christian Europe in the mid 17th century. They were introduced by merchants and migrants with links between the two worlds. The first was established on St Mark’s Square in Venice in 1647. Five years later Pasqua Rosée, a Greek, set up London’s first coffeehouse in St Michael’s Alley in the City of London. Armenians played decisive roles in establishing the first cafés in Paris (at the St Germain fair in 1671) and Vienna (a spy in the post-siege Habsburg capital set up its first kaffeehaus in 1685). Organised around the consumption of a stimulant, these places contrasted with the raucous intoxication associated with taverns. Coffeehouses soon emerged as centres of exchange, information and debate.  Jeremy Cliffe, New Statesman

e anche di dolcetti si parla, parlando di Proust:

Over the course of Villa Albertine’s Proust Weekend, a series of talks, workshops, and readings celebrating the forthcoming English translation of the last volume of the Recherche and the centenary of Proust’s death, I ate more cakes per diem than usual: on Sunday afternoon, a miniature pistachio financier, a Lego-shaped and moss-textured cake that reminded me of the enormous chartreuse muffins at my college cafeteria; on Saturday morning, a crisp, disc-like, almond-sliver-sprinkled shortbread cookie with a hole, which reminded me of a Chinese coin; and, on Friday night, at a holiday party, a dish of Reddi-wip and sour cream studded with canned mandarin slices and maraschino cherries apparently called ambrosia salad. It reminded me of the music video for Katy Perry’s “California Gurls.” But these were really only preliminary research exercises for the episode in which Proust Weekend was to culminate: a “Proust-inspired madeleine event with surprise guests”!

Leggere

 the joy of reading slowly:

Elizabeth Strout, the Booker-shortlisted author of Olive Kitteridge and the Lucy Barton books, is also taking books at a more tranquil pace. “I was never a fast reader [but] I think I read more slowly than I used to. This is partly to savour every word. The way a sentence sounds to my ear is so important to me in the whole reading experience, and I always want to get it all – like when you read poetry.” Susie Mesure, The Guardian

the joy of reading everything:

n the summer of 2011, during the quieter days that followed hurricane Irene, the writer Phyllis Rose headed to the New York Society Library on the Upper East Side of the city in search of a 1936 novel by Charles Nordhoff and James Norman Hall. Hurricane [...] Once it was in her hand, however, her enthusiasm for it began to trickle away. [...] The question was: what should she read instead? [...] This was unnerving. It made her mildly anxious, her sudden awareness of all these unknown authors and their unknown books, and perhaps as a means of assuaging this unease, she began to formulate a plan. What if she was to pick, at random, a fiction shelf and read her way through its contents? What, if anything, would she learn? Rachel Cooke, The Guardian

Colette, Pig-Pen and Intelligence

che cos'hanno in comune Colette, Pig-Pen e l'intelligenza? Che sono tutti qui, questa settimana. Di Colette, che sta godendo di grande popolarità in America al momento, ci parla Michael LaPointe sul New Yorker:

Physical beauty was always important to Colette. She prized the body over the mind—as suggested by the title of Judith Thurman’s excellent biography, “Secrets of the Flesh”—and believed that focussing on the physical was essential to writing “like a woman, without anything moralistic or theoretical.” 

di Pig-Pen ci parla Elif Batuman su Astra: 

Readers’ love of Pig-Pen was reportedly a burden to Charles M. Schulz. Much as Arthur Conan Doyle attempted to kill off Sherlock Holmes in 1893 only to bring him back nine years later, so did Schultz write Pig-Pen out of the series from 1967 to 1976. Pig-Pen himself is not uninfluenced by Conan Doyle: he is, in essence, a walking clue. “I can tell just where you’ve been all week from the dirt on your clothes,” Charlie Brown tells a consternated Pig-Pen in August 1965, proceeding to rattle off a series of dusty locations.] [... Discussion of genetics and intelligence is particularly fraught because of how it’s been twisted by racists to justify oppression and violence. Simply typing the words “genes” and “intelligence” in the same sentence can be enough to raise eyebrows.

infine Tom Bartlett affronta la controversa questione del rapporto genetica-intelligenza umana:

Research on human intelligence tends to be a magnet for controversy, with papers leading to protests and speakers drawing scorn. [...] Discussion of genetics and intelligence is particularly fraught because of how it’s been twisted by racists to justify oppression and violence. Simply typing the words “genes” and “intelligence” in the same sentence can be enough to raise eyebrows. The Chronicle of Higher Education

 

The Singularities by John Banville

Here comes John Banville’s 20th novel under his own name, a wild masked ball rife with gossip about the books that have preceded it. We are in the world of 2009’s The Infinities, with which The Singularities shares an Irish country-house setting and a handful of characters. But here, too, is Freddie Montgomery, the violent protagonist of an earlier trilogy of novels – The Book of Evidence, Ghosts and Athena – itself seeded by a real-life murder in 1982 that not only horrified Ireland but scandalised it when links to the country’s political class emerged. Alex Clark, The Guardian

un nuovo libro di Banville è sempre un piacere!

Italy’s Great Historical Novel

Last month, the Modern Library added to its list “The Betrothed” (“I Promessi Sposi”), from 1842, by the Italian writer Alessandro Manzoni, in a new translation—the first in fifty years—by Michael F. Moore.In some respects, this is a curious choice. Most readers outside Italy will not have heard of the title, or even of the author. In Italy, the book is considered a pillar of the national literature, perhaps second only to the Divine Comedy. Joan Acocella, The New Yorker

ottima cosa, questa nuova traduzione e questa riscoperta di Manzoni. E visto che parliamo di classici, vi propongo il primo racconto di Nora Ephron sul New Yorker, "About (Almost Surely) New York", ovviamente. Risale al novembre del 1974.

Something has happened to telephone booths in New York. No one knows when it happened, and no one knows what it is that happened, but something has happened. Telephone booths in New York are different. They have changed. There are people who say it has to do with what they look like, and there are people who say that it has to do with whether they are out of order, and there are people who say that all that is beside the point. What matters, they say, is that something has happened to telephone booths in New York. Nora Ephron, The New Yorker

 

Book Clubs e traduzioni

Book clubs, by their nature, interfere with the way a book is meant to be experienced. By removing enjoyment as an explicit factor in picking up or sticking with the book (because you’re reading it for the book club), they call into question the worth of the exercise as a whole. Naomi Kanakia, LA Review of Books

una lunga discussione sul perché i book club sono noiosi e come si dovrebbe discutere di un libro. E un'altra lunga discussione sull'arte della traduzione,"The Art of Betrayal: Translation in an Age of Suspicion"

Each language is a world unto itself and has been at least since the destruction of the Tower of Babel. It may share certain territories or weather systems with others, but it is not, nor ever can be identical to another. As Emily Apter pointed out in her introduction to the Dictionary of Untranslatables, “Nothing is exactly the same in one language as in another, so the failure of translation is always necessary and absolute. Apart from its neglect of the fact that some pretty good equivalencies are available, this proposition rests on a mystification, on a dream of perfection we cannot even want, let alone have.” Tess Lewis, The Hudson Review

Cancel Culture

When the Pew Research Center recently asked working journalists to pick one word to describe the media, the overwhelming plurality, nearly 50 percent, picked words such as chaos and struggling—with financial insecurity, with organizational dysfunction. Gone is the age when independent writers could make a living reporting; gone is the age when veteran editors knew how to market books; gone even is the recent age when Twitter celebrity sold books. Eve Fairbanks, The Atlantic

un bell'articolo sulla cancel culture. 

Inoltre: il progresso morale avanza di pari passo a quello scientifico e tecnologico? Un bel libro esplora la questione: MacAskill, What We Owe the Future (Basics).

Oxford philosopher William MacAskill thinks morality requires us to take care of the future. His new book, What We Owe the Future, seeks to explain what this obligation amounts to, and intervenes in various philosophical debates about morality and moral status. What We Owe the Future is written in a simple style, a shining example of the conventions of the analytic philosophy tradition—conventions from which many philosophers quickly depart when writing for the public. His views are stated so clearly as to resemble slogans but defended so rigorously as to seem the opposite. “You can shape the course of history,” MacAskill writes—and, he adds, you ought to. Oliver Traldi, City Journal

Diane Arbus e Yuval Noah Harari

hanno molto poco in comune, se non che questa settimana ho trovato due articoli interessanti su di loro, e quindi si trovano, qui, in compagnia.

On the other hand, in Arbus’ case, the photograph might be the weapon. To enter Cataclysm—a facsimile of the Museum of Modern Art exhibition that so disturbed Sontag, staged on its 50th anniversary by the David Zwirner galley—is to be zapped across the room by the close-ups on the opposite wall. Tightly framed (or cropped), Arbus’ subjects typically stare directly into the camera. The show is something of a confrontation. J. Hoberman, Tablet

in occasione di una mostra: "Cataclysm: The 1972 Diane Arbus Retrospective Revisited" at David Zwirner from September 14 through October 22, 2022, at 537 W 20th St, New York, NY 10011

e su Hariri:

The best-selling author is a gifted storyteller and popular speaker. But he sacrifices science for sensationalism, and his work is riddled with errors. Darshana Narayanan, Current Affairs

The Golden Mole

But this is a 21st-century bestiary, and rather than trying to slot animals, birds and fish into a Christian worldview, Rundell – author of wondrous children’s books and recently a thrilling biography of John Donne – is arguing urgently for their survival. Samantha Ellis, The Guardian

si parla di The Golden Mole and Other Living Treasure, di Katherine Rundell (Faber).

Follow the Leader

Whether it’s because of the uncertain times in which we live, the dismal nature of our political leaders, or the rise of rightwing populism, we have had a spate of books in recent years on leadership in modern history. From Frank Dikötter’s How to Be a Dictator to Henry Kissinger’s Leadership, the format seems to be to string together chapters on various world leaders who changed the course of history, for good or bad, and reflect on the patterns between them.

The latest offering is Ian Kershaw’s Personality and Power, in which the great historian of Hitler and his movement pens a dozen lucid portraits of the leaders – half of them dictators, the others democrats, to varying degrees – who shaped Europe’s 20th century. Orlando Figes, The Guardian

Texting etiquette

It’s ironic. Texting was meant to make communication easier, but it can be much harder to discern someone’s tone over text, especially with inflections as subtle as sarcasm. 

It’s not as straightforward as tacking a crying-laughing-face emoji onto the end of a message either—sorry, but you are officially Old if you unironically use emojis. Your options are “lol” (which can sometimes come across as quite passive aggressive), “haha” (again, this sounds too abrupt), or, my personal favourite, “lmao” (which translates as a hyperbolic but less blunt “laughing my ass off,” for those who didn’t know). That said—“loool” or “hahahaha” are also good options. Serena Smith, Prospect

in effetti mi rendo conto di quanto siamo diventati bravi a individuare le emozioni nei messaggini! Sempre riguardo la nuova tecnologia e la sua ingerenza ovunque, anche nei sentimenti e nell'arte, da leggere l'articolo di John Herrman intitolato "Intelligencer" sul New York Magazine.

infine un bell'articolo sul lavoro che sta dietro all'uscita di un'opera letteraria straniera (scouting, traduzione, editing, ecc.), "Breaking Into English" di Lily Meyer, Los Angeles Review of Books 

Ian McEwan

Ian McEwan, slumped on a comfortable couch in the large formal sitting room of his Cotswolds manor house, dazzling early-summer sun filtering through the tall, narrow windows, tells me he has been suffering from a protracted bout of pessimism. Adam Begley, The Atlantic

bel ritratto dello scrittore. E anche, come è nata l'idea dei libri per bambini, Choose Your Own Adventure Books:

You were a girl who wanted to choose your own adventures. Which is to say, you were a girl who never had adventures. You always followed the rules. But, when you ate an entire sleeve of graham crackers and sank into the couch with a Choose Your Own Adventure book, you got to imagine that you were getting into trouble in outer space, or in the future, or under the sea. You got to make choices every few pages: Do you ask the ghost about her intentions, or run away? Do you rebel against the alien overlords, or blindly obey them? Leslie Jamison, The New Yorker

Jean Rhys

There isn’t an adjective more appropriate than “haunted” to describe the deeply troubled, self-lacerating, and finally (to a degree) triumphant life of the Caribbean-born Jean Rhys. As presented by Miranda Seymour in I Used to Live Here Once [Norton], her richly detailed, exhaustively researched, and warmly sympathetic new biography, Rhys appears to have been haunted by memories of her girlhood on the small, largely impoverished island of Dominica, then a British colony. Joyce Carol Oates, The New York Review

How Toxic Is Masculinity?

Ten years ago, Hanna Rosin’s book, “The End of Men,” argued that feminism had largely achieved its aims, and that it was time to start worrying about the coming obsolescence of men. American women were getting more undergraduate and graduate degrees than American men, and were better placed to flourish in a “feminized” job market that prized communication and flexibility. For the first time in American history, they were outnumbering men in the workplace. “The modern economy is becoming a place where women hold the cards,” Rosin wrote.The events of the past decade—the rise of Trump, the emergence of the #MeToo movement, the overturning of Roe v. Wade—have had a sobering effect on this sort of triumphalism. The general tone of feminist rhetoric has grown distinctly tougher and more cynical. Zoë Heller, The New Yorker

inoltre, un lungo articolo/chiacchierata su e con Ian McEwan, che parla dell'attacco a Salman Rushdie e del suo nuovo libro, Lessons (Vintage).

We had met earlier in the summer to discuss McEwan’s epic new novel, Lessons, in which the fatwa issued against Rushdie for The Satanic Verses in 1989 appears as part of the novel’s far-reaching look at postwar British history. “It was a watershed moment for those of us around Salman,” he says now. For writers, intellectuals and artists in the 70s or 80s, religion wasn’t an issue: “We didn’t even deny religion, it just didn’t come up.” So when the fatwa was decreed, “it was explosive. It cut across the sort of multicultural assumptions we had at the time. People whom we naturally most wanted to defend from racism were burning books in Bradford.” Lisa Allardice, The Guardian

Should revenge ever be a part of justice?

I think revenge may also be a way of dealing with grief.[...] Perhaps their strength of feeling was linked to a kind of survivor’s guilt, a sense they would be letting the victim down if they did not try to ensure the murderer suffered as much as possible. I suspect such feelings will only have made their bereavement worse – as the adage goes, hating someone else is like taking poison yourself and waiting for them to die. But as a response to trauma, it is not inevitable. For every vengeful family member of a homicide victim, another will choose not to be, feeling that retribution and hatred won’t do anything to replace their loss or assuage their pain. It seems a complex matter of conditioning, choice, and sometimes religious belief that sends individuals in either direction; I count myself fortunate that I’ve not had to stand at that junction myself, and don’t wish to judge anyone who has. Gwen Adshead, The Guardian

un articolo molto interessante, con una bibliografia altrettanto interessante.  Inoltre, dieci libri non mainstream su Israele:

What constitutes a literature of Israel? Is it the holy triumvirate of Amos Oz, AB Yehoshua and David Grossman? I don’t really think so. Is it the poetry of Chaim Nachman Bialik? Maybe. Or could it be the marginal pamphlets and pocket books of long-forgotten Zionist romance and pulp Hebrew detectives, where David Tidhar – no relation – reigned supreme? Is it the westerns, horror novels and softcore porn by such delightfully named authors as “Mike Longshott” and “Kim Rockman”, that one can still find on dusty shelves or in the Jaffa flea market from time to time? Lavie Tidhar, The Guardian

segnalo infine un articolo sul nostro Italo Svevo, "The Italian Proust," l'autore è Nathaniel Rich, ed è uscito sul The New York Review

The Draw of the Sea

It was a tragedy that sent novelist Wyl Menmuir to the “demi-island” of Cornwall, with its long and sinuous shoreline. In 2011, his first child was stillborn and he went with his wife down to the wild north coast of the county to escape. It was winter, and cold, and yet he walked into the ocean. “And for a few moments the grief wasn’t silenced so much as confronted by a wall of deafening white noise muting its constant scream. The sea’s great indifference was a comfort in a way I can’t easily explain and it continues to play its part.” Alex Preston, The Guardian

Syllabus: Myth in the Hebrew Bible

Myth in the Hebrew Bible is a complex and controversial topic, depending on how one defines myth and sometimes on one’s religious orientation. In everyday usage today, myth carries a meaning of something untrue, a fable, a fiction, or an illusion. That usage has a long history, traceable back to certain Greek philosophers. Anthropologists and historians of religion, however, use the term “myth” with a quite different meaning. For them myth refers to a traditional story, usually associated with the time of origins (e.g., creation or some important institution) that has paradigmatic significance for the society in which the story is operative. In this latter meaning, myth is characteristic of every traditional society; some would argue that myth continues to be operative even in modern, scientific society, camouflaged under other terms, including science itself (e.g., the big bang theory). Persons who hold that the Bible has been infallibly revealed by God and those who consider myth as something untrue may well find it offensive to posit that myth is present in the Bible. By contrast, those who see myth as one of the ways that a traditional society expresses it most profound truths may find inspiration in seeing biblical narratives as myth. Oxford Bibliographies

Syllabus: Women and Gender in the Bible and the Ancient World

This course will study in depth some of the narratives of female characters of the Bible, reading closely and considering a variety of perspectives, including historical, literary, theological and ideological approaches. Students will have the opportunity to engage in close reading of selected texts from different divisions of the Bible’ relate biblical texts to a variety of religious and secular contexts; discuss feminism and gender theory and their applications in biblical scholarship; becomes familiar with a range of theoretical interpretative approaches to texts. The course will explore intersections of gender, sex, race, ethnicity and class across the stories of women in both the Hebrew Bible and the New Testament. University of Glasgow, Humanities

Syllabi. Hebrew Scriptures/Old Testament

Interpretation of the Hebrew Bible (Tanakh), or ‘Old Testament,’ played a formative role in the development of the religions of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. This course provides an overview of the diverse genres of literature contained within the Hebrew Bible as well as an introduction to its modern critical study. Representative passages drawn from the mythological, imaginative, prophetic, and cultic strata of the Bible are examined in some detail, with emphasis laid upon acquiring a nuanced understanding of the significance of these passages within their historical and literary contexts. UNC Charlotte, Religious Studies

Syllabi. Defining the Moral Body: Sex, Race, and Gender in Religion

What is the ideal, moral body in a given culture? How does it perform? What does it look like? How does it survive in a pluralistic, global religious society? Are there multiple and/or shifting ideals? In this course, we will consider the ways religious discourses and practices have been used to assign meanings to the body and its activities. Through an exploration of varied religious contexts across historical time, we will interrogate how specific religious cultures have defined the boundaries of moral bodies via regulations concerning "appropriate" sexual, gendered, and racial performance. By examining the relationship between religious vocabularies--such as immorality, primitivism, and divine imperative--the racialization and gendering of bodies in the modern era, social taboos, and more, we will access broader questions regarding how religious discourses dictate and regulate the moral body. Stanford University, Religious Studies

quest'estate farò una ricerca di syllabi interessanti su valori/miti/narrazioni fondativi della nostra cultura.  Ogni suggerimento è benvenuto!

Emmanuel Carrère e TS Eliot

 ... non hanno nulla in comune, ma sono il soggetto di due articoli interessanti, che mettono in luce i lati inquietanti dei due scrittori. Di Emmanuele Carrère parla Ian Parker sul New Yorker. Ecco l'incipit dell'articolo:

Emmanuel Carrère, who writes with the clear-eyed judgment of someone who has trained himself, against instinct, to take an interest in other people, was eating lunch one day last fall in a restaurant in north-central Paris. Charline Bourgeois-Tacquet, a film director and Carrère’s partner, had joined him; they live nearby, in an apartment as spare and as sunny as one in a yogurt commercial. 

di TS Eliot parla Erica Wagner su The New Statesmen:

Withdrawn and prejudiced, the poet is hard to warm to – but Robert Crawford’s new biography shows how Eliot’s second marriage transformed his life.

si allude alla nuova biografia di Eliot, Robert Crawford, Eliot: After The Waste Land (Jonathan Cape).

Words

vorrei segnalare una serie di interviste a docenti e critici letterari sul proprio mestiere. Sono uscite su   The Point Magazine a cura di Jessica Swoboda. Qui è l'introduzione all'intervista a Terry Eagleton, professore di letteratura a Oxford, Manchester e Lancaster.

Our conversation traversed the worlds of Derrida and Foucault, the political arena of the Sixties and Seventies, the decline of theory and the value in writing for public venues. Many jokes were made, laughs were shared, and I left encouraged to try on different writing styles. I also left convinced that one of the most important habits we can develop as writers is doing justice to our opponents’ arguments. That doesn’t mean, though, that we have to stop throwing punches.

Eagleton, a Marxist literary critic, has written eighty essays for the London Review of Books alone and published over fifty books, with four more books in the pipeline. His book Literary Theory: An Introduction is even an academic best seller, having sold over 750,000 copies. It’s no wonder, then, that the Independent has referred to him as “the man who succeeded F R Leavis as Britain’s most influential academic critic.” Our conversation confirms that the question uniting his many publications is: What is the meaning of literature? We talked over the phone in March and April. 

sempre a proposito di scrittura, segnalo la lettera di Ali Smith a George Orwell sul perché scriviamo.

Dear George Orwell,

Why do we write? Given that words and reality, as you once put it, are so often « no liker » to each other « than chessmen to living beings ».

Because I’m writing to you now from a future no-one could have seen coming –– except maybe yourself, and H G Wells, and J G Ballard and the furthest-seeing writers over the centuries from Sophocles to Margaret Atwood.

Because everything you wrote gifts us with the knowledge that words are the chesspieces by which the powers that be will play their games with our lives. You know, as the current UK Prime Minister puts it, that « human beings are creatures of the imagination », that « people live by narrative ». Ali Smith, European Review of Books

 

I'm A Fan

The protagonist of Sheena Patel’s corrosive, brilliant debut, a 30-year-old arts freelancer living in south London, is fanatical about two individuals: “the man I want to be with” “the woman I am obsessed with”, who is also having an affair with “the man I want to be with”.[...]

Patel offers no way out from the brutal arena of fandom into which she organises human life. But what makes I’m a Fan so successful is the protagonist’s ability to interpret and critique the toxicity of these structures even as she is caught inside them. She recognises, with shattering clarity, that if she goes on like this she could “turn out to be the man I want to be with in all the ways I don’t want to be”. Lamorna Ash, The Guardian

il romanzo di cui si parla è I'm A Fan, di Sheena Patel (Rough Trade Books). Inoltre un bell'articolo (purtroppo solo per abbonati) sui lessicografi dietro l'Oxford English Dictionary. 

From aardvark to woke: inside the Oxford English Dictionary The OED’s task – to define every part of the world’s most spoken language – is as ambitious as it was 150 years ago. 

The team at the Oxford English Dictionary felt some nervousness about writing the definition for “Terf”, an acronym for trans-exclusionary radical feminist, which this month has been added to its pages. “To a certain extent, it is like any other word,” says Fiona McPherson, a 50-year-old lexicographer from Grangemouth, Stirlingshire, who has worked at the dictionary since 1997. “But it would be disingenuous to say that it is exactly the same. There seems more at stake. You want to be accurate, you want to be neutral. But it’s a lot easier to be neutral about a word that isn’t controversial.” Pippa Bailey, The New Statesman

 

What Makes Censors Tick?

[...] a “censor is one who seeks to exert control over the culture through law, based on the idea that he or she, speaking for the community, has a right to draw the boundary lines for speech.” The censor is convinced that “some forms of expression are so vile or dangerous that they should be restricted, or so valuable that they should be compelled.” Consequently, censors “claim the moral sanction to speak for the collective, either by enforcing ‘community standards’ against evil expression or by mandating speech that they believe serves the ‘public interest.’” Stephen Rohde, LARB

di fatto Stephen Rohde cita un paragrafo di un libro sulla censura uscito alla fine dello scorso anno, Robert Corn-Revere, The Mind of the Censor and the Eye of the Beholder: The First Amendment and the Censor’s Dilemma (Cambridge University Press)

un altro libro curioso, uscito alla fine dell'anno scorso, è quello di  Jonathan Purkis, Driving With Strangers: What Hitchhiking Tells Us About Humanity (Manchester University Press)

The earliest known written account of hitchhiking was by a student named Charles Brown Jr, who in 1916 described his 800-mile journey from Fort Wayne, Indiana to New York City. He got rides from, among others, a priest, an artist, a teacher and a doctor, the last of these so fascinated by Brown’s adventure that, despite being en route to a medical emergency, he overshot his destination by ten miles.  Mike Jay, LRB

L'understatement e il sorriso

The essence of adulthood, I suddenly grasped, was internalizing understatement. It meant sublimating one’s raw, emotional insides to something drier on the outside, something more even-tempered and hence more sophisticated. To put aside childish things, one had to ditch not only the tantrums of the toddler years but the gushing of the early teens.

Today the opposite is true, even—particularly—on applications for colleges, internships and jobs. It’s not enough to be an all-state musician or varsity athlete, with the years of commitment that represents. Now applications all insist that you “tell us about your passion.” As with teenage Instagram posts, the pressure to be passionate encourages the applicant to flaunt and exaggerate, to make grandiose claims—to remain, in other words, a hyperbolic adolescent rather than taking a step toward becoming an adult capable of seeing one’s own life in a broader context. Caitlin Macy, WSJ

e una storia del sorriso:

The smile as we know it was thus out and about in the Western world from the 13th century onwards. Literature demonstrates that, in the centuries that followed, it evoked much of the range of feelings that we attach to it in our own culture. [...] Yet if the smile was alive and well in Western culture, it was not yet our own. In Western art, it differed in one highly significant respect: the smiling mouth was almost always closed. Teeth appear in facial representations extremely rarely. One can scan drawings, paintings and sculptures from before the 19th century in art galleries and museums the world over without finding a single example of a tooth-baring smile of the kind that is so common in our own day.

Brooklyn o Manhattan?

In American cultural and intellectual life, New York City sets the tone. As the main hub for the country’s media and frequent originator of trends that percolate through US society, what’s “in” with the New York scene today is often central to American culture tomorrow. And politics, too ­– as US conservatives never tire of noting – is often downstream of culture.

But New York City’s intellectual landscape is increasingly split between two warring scenes, divided by geography, aesthetics and politics. Which of these prevails could affect whether America shifts right or remains where it is. Nick Burns, The New Stateman

e dieci libri sull'ascolto della natura:

From precise transliterations of birdsong to a quest for one square inch of silence, these stories teach us how to open our ears to the world. David George Haskell, The Guardian

Not Unpacking My Library

I have moved a lot in my life, too much, and in the chaos that every move entails, in the churning and trashing of possessions, in the reckoning with everything unfinished and forgotten that inevitably rises to the surface, it is the unpacking of books that always served as a kind of a ritual act, an alignment of physical and mental: I’d look at them and feel that I finally landed, that I’m back in the familiar. [...]

This time around, though, our books are not making me feel content or at home, and that’s why there are still 15 or so hefty boxes stacked atop of each other. [...]

Seriously: Is there another way for me to construct an outward-facing identity? As Walter Benjamin admitted, pacing around his own still-in-crates library, “what else is this collection but a disorder to which habit accommodated itself to such an extent that it can appear as order?” Jake Marmer, Tablet

la complicata relazione con i libri e con la lettura. Ma anche la complicata relazione con la scrittura:

Still, the act of writing poses a predicament for anyone who recognizes the temptations of pride and self-aggrandizement. We simultaneously desire to attract recognition and seek to avoid it. We want to engage an audience, yet we see that approbation flatters our egos and that criticism is painful. Although wiser people tell us not to read comments, with today's technology, readers' responses are exceedingly difficult to evade. And try as we might to ignore them, the words of critics can still wound us.

How, then, should we think about displaying ourselves — or at least our thoughts and words — in public? And where does the allure of public writing leave the activity of scholarly writing? Elizabeth Corey, National Affairs

 

The history of Nazism in Small Objects

‘I can’t cook,’ writes the historian Karina Urbach, ‘which is probably why it took me so long to realise that we had two cookbooks on our shelf at home with the same title’ – a 1938 edition by her grandmother Alice and one from the following year attributed to Rudolf Rösch. When she did notice, however, it provided a key to unlocking some fascinating family history and a little known strand of Nazi persecution. Matthew Reisz, Spectator

interessante recensione a due libri che attraverso oggetti comuni - un libro di cucina, un coltello - scrivono insolite storie del nazismo. I libri sono: Alice’s Book: How the Nazis Stole My Grandmother’s Cookbook, di Karina Urbach (MacLehose/Quercus); e My Grandfather’s Knife and Other Stories of War and Belonging (Joseph Pearson). Nella foto Alice Urbach - l'autrice del libro di cucina di cui si parla.

E, dagli archivi del Guardian, un articolo sull'importanza della letteratura nell'insegnarci a capire meglio i sentimenti altrui:

New research shows works by writers such as Charles Dickens and Téa Obreht sharpen our ability to understand others' emotions – more than thrillers or romance novels. Liz Bury, The Guardian

Bernard Malamud's Mistress

Dusty Sklar intervista Arlene Heyman, psicanalista newyorkese che, negli anni '60 fu l'amante di Malamud:

Dusty Sklar: When did you attend Bernard Malamud’s class? Why did you choose his particular class?

Arlene Heyman: In 1961 I was a sophomore at Bennington College, 19 years old, when I first heard that Bernard Malamud would be coming to Vermont to teach creative writing. He had already won the National Book Award for The Magic Barrel so he was known and respected in the literary world—which was the only world that mattered to many of us. Tablet Magazine

Old Bookstores

Marius Kociejowski opens his enthralling memoir, “A Factotum in the Book Trade,” (Biblioasis) by observing that bookstores have begun to follow record stores into nonexistence. “With every shop that closes so, too, goes still more of the serendipity that feeds the human spirit.” While there may be “infinitely more choice” in buying from online dealers, “to be spoiled for choice extinguishes desire.” As he says, “I want dirt; I want chaos; I want, above all, mystery. I want to be able to step into a place and have the sense that there I’ll find a book, as yet unknown to me, which to some degree will change my life.” Michael Dirda, WP

How to Be an Incipit

 

For a long time, the first sentence went to bed early, waiting discreetly under the cover of the book for someone to come and wake it up. Novel opened, first sentence awakened, it stood firmly in the front row to welcome readers with the heavy responsibility of taking them into a new world.

Then the first sentence had a craving for freedom. It took a liking to running away, proclaiming its autonomy, breaking its ties with the book that birthed it. Paul Vacca, berfrois

in effetti, che responsabilità, essere la prima frase!
E le finaliste al Women’s prize for fiction:

Six countries are represented on this year’s Women’s prize for fiction shortlist, with Meg Mason and Elif Shafak among those in the running for the £30,000 prize. The New Zealander and the Turkish-British author are up against two Americans, one American-Canadian and a Trinidadian debut novelist.  Lucy Knight, The Guardian

What will we be reading next year?

 

Five biggest trends from the London book fair. [...]

1. Celebrity-authored fiction is on the up
2. Books about Ukraine are in demand
3. Greek myths rumble on
4. Women’s stories are getting darker
5. Self-help books are taking on new relevance. Sarah Shaffi, The Guardian

e anche:

Top 10 books about gardening
Going beyond how-to guides, these books encompass fiction, history, poetry and ecology to show how gardens can be places of liberation as well as beauty. Lulah Ellender, The Guardian

 

Seek and Hide

In Seek and Hide: The Tangled History of the Right to Privacy (Viking), the legal scholar Amy Gajda links our present struggle to an underappreciated tradition in American law and thought. She argues that although the right to privacy may have been a 19th-century innovation, privacy sensibilities have since the nation’s beginnings served as a durable counterweight to the hallowed principles of free speech, free expression, and the right to know. Sarah E. Igo, The Atlantic

un articolo molto interessante. Forse non adatto a Pasqua, auguri a tutti, comunque!

What Comes After Meritocracy?

The system of educational selection based on standardized testing to identify the intellectually talented is now under withering attack, and it is in the process of failing. The projects to replace it with more representative systems are appealing but ultimately inadequate for addressing the range of problems the country faces. Fortunately, it is possible to identify an approach that is adequate to our condition. That approach focuses on selection in line with the civic ideals elite colleges already profess but do not fully engage. Steven Brint, Chronicle of Higher Education

un articolo interessante sul declino della meritocrazia e su quali criteri affidare la selezione degli studenti.
Inoltre, i piaceri dei romanzoni...

The unique pleasures delivered in long books are unforgettable enough that every reader will likely have his own catalog, and some instances are quite famous. One pleasure arises when a forgotten minor character returns unexpectedly to divert the plot, years after his role seemed at an end. (It happens memorably in different volumes of Balzac’s The Human Comedy, as in The Black Sheep, when the belligerent brother, Philippe, returns to foil the new bully menacing our hero.)

Another occurs when a protagonist absorbs an antagonist’s understanding of an event long after its reality seemed fixed, revising our conception of what has transpired. Mark Greif, The Atlantic

 

 

Balene

Le balene mi hanno sempre affascinato. Allora prendiamoci un break da guerra e brutte notizie e seguiamo questo curioso viaggio di una madre e un figlio per le vie delle balene. Il libro di cui si parla è Soundings: Journeys in the Company of Whales (Virago), di Doreen Cunningham.

Cunningham adroitly sidesteps much of the male-dominated narratives about whales and whaling, and clearly takes inspiration more from Inuit mythology than from Herman Melville. She and her son make for an unconventionally heroic pair, travelling by
plane, train, bus and boat, and incurring disapproving looks and small humiliations in their quest to spot grey whales. Initially it seems that nothing fits, including lifejackets, and at times the landscape seems irredeemably hostile (even cacti appear to give them the finger). Whale mothers and their calves, meanwhile, surface and dive alongside the pair, and Cunningham movingly describes their bonds of cooperation, which find pointed echoes and contrasts in her travelling companions and personal relationships. Her sensuous descriptions of grey whales and humpbacks provide some of the book’s richest passages; she looks at the whales and then looks at her son, looking at whales, which look back. Edward Posnett, The Guardian